Veg out and find the surprising benefits of eating conscientiously

Does anyone really enjoy a meal with a virtuous eater, the kind of woman whose hand rises like a shield as the bread basket is passed to her or who beatifically shakes her head when the waiter arrives to inquire about dessert? No one would have mistaken either of us for that kind of woman. Instead, as we spent the past two years writing a book together, a lot of our best—not to mention our happiest—work was done over late-night spicy tuna rolls or sitting down to frittatas at brunch. The idea of trying to go vegan—that is, giving up all meat, fish, poultry, dairy, and eggs—for six weeks, maybe longer, wasn't inspired by tofu Reubens or pumpkin-seed-crusted tempeh, but by cheeseburgers garnished with onion rings. They were delicious, but we both woke up in the middle of the night—not for the first time—with racing hearts. The next day we wondered: Did the problem lay in our diets?

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We loved food, but we were increasingly concerned about whether the food we loved was any good for us. We'd grown paranoid about allergies, antibiotic-laced milk, and FDA reports on salmonella outbreaks. Not to mention the cruelty of factory farming and the environmental impact of our eating habits. Kara alternated between patting herself on the back for eating more fish—touted by nutritionists for its brain-building omega-3 fats—and worrying about how much methylmercury she was ingesting. Marisa's fondness for steak frites waned every time she turned on the TV and saw yet another image of cows mooing mournfully in overcrowded feedlots.

Though we both dismissed veganism as a hippie-dippy, self-righteous lifestyle, a slew of new books made us reconsider. In The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, ethicists Peter Singer and Jim Mason say that veganism is the best answer to the ethical quandaries posed by eating animal products. Both Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry's Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen advocate more conscientious forms of eating. We've known since 1971, when Lappé's mother, Frances Moore Lappé, published Diet for a Small Planet, that if the Western world were to eat lower on the food chain, it would free up grain that is currently fed to livestock for human consumption, effectively ending world hunger. And by not eating animal products, there is no more worry about whether the chicken or cow on your plate has been forced to feed on the feces of other animals before being cruelly killed in a slaughterhouse.

It would be patronizing to call a lifestyle choice as carefully considered and socially engaged as veganism "chic," but it certainly has high-profile devotees, like Gwyneth Paltrow, Natalie Portman, Joaquin Phoenix, Russell Simmons, Moby, and Outkast's André 3000. Most vegans center their diets on fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and protein sources such as tofu, tempeh, seitan, and beans—not exactly what most guys consider a romantic dinner. Would Kara's boyfriend—who loved that she was always game for meeting friends over chicken wings and beer—want to leave her at home where she couldn't bum anyone out? Would Marisa ruin dates by interrogating waiters about the ingredients in her entrée?

At least we'd have each other. To kick things off, we'd also have Joy Pierson and Bart Potenza, the owners of Candle 79, a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side thankfully free of vegetarian clichés. On a Monday night the restaurant is warmly lit and booked with Chanel-suited ladies and their mates, well-turned-out families, even Tom Wolfe in his white suit. "Don't think about what you can't do, but about what you can do," counsels Pierson, pushing a plate of seitan piccata at us. "Try new fruits and vegetables. Go to the farmers' market."

It will be easy to cook, thanks to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. And it will be easy to dine meat- and dairy-free in style, she assures us: Swanky vegan-friendly spots like Sarma Melngailis' Pure Food and Wine in New York, and Lee Gross's M Café de Chaya in Los Angeles, have sprouted across the country, as have high-end veganish bakeries like the Bleeding Heart in Chicago and Babycakes on New York's Lower East Side. But she agrees that restaurants can be a minefield, like the steak house where even the potatoes are rubbed in bacon fat. Before eating out, she suggests browsing the menu online, then calling to find out whether, for instance, the pasta is cooked in chicken stock.

Going vegan, it turns out, is like joining a very healthy, socially engaged, vegetable-obsessed sorority. Pierson tells her friend Alicia Silverstone, a vegan of eight years, about our experiment. "I'd love to be your coach," Silverstone says when we speak one day after she has biked to a health food store in Nova Scotia, where she's filming a movie. She tells us to call if we get any meat cravings and e-mails us her food tips, which include leafy greens like spinach or kale once a day for calcium; seaweed twice a week to "feel like superwoman"; whole grains at every meal; and protein daily.

Ah, protein. If you decide to go vegan, be prepared for anyone you meet to needle you about whether you're getting enough. We are sufficiently concerned that we call nutritionist Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of What to Eat. "Most Americans get twice as much protein as they need," she says, noting that if we're eating beans and grains, we're almost certainly okay. The only thing to worry about is B12, a vitamin that helps maintain healthy red blood cells that exists only in animal products but can be taken in multivitamin form every day. Even calcium isn't a problem. "You don't need as much calcium if you're a vegan," Nestle says. "One reason our calcium recommendations are so high is because a lot of animal foods cause calcium to be excreted."

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Dining out is easier than expected, but it's still a downer to go to a restaurant and realize that every salad is covered with cheese and the only entrée you can have is a bowl of pasta. Marisa isn't exactly the life of a Brooklyn dinner party where she won't eat the main course or dessert. At an important work lunch, Kara can't find anything except for a beet salad, then forgets to ask the waiter to hold the cheese and despairs when a forkful delivers an errant slice of Parmesan. But the funny thing is that it doesn't make her want more. It isn't that meat and cheese lose their appeal; it's just that we're excited to be connoisseurs of a new cuisine. We spend a lot of time e-mailing each other about our sudden fondness for taro root or a salad of beets and peaches. "I had seitan with this lemon sauce and brown rice and barley tea," Marisa effuses after a memorable meal. Going vegan also encourages cooking at home. And domesticity, so new to both of us, turns out to be kind of fun. "We just had the most amazing bulgar-and-kale salad," gushes Kara about a meal she cooked for her boyfriend. Not bad for girls who'd never touched bulgar and for whom cooking meant artfully arranging Brie on a platter.

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The transition is made even easier by our roomier jeans. We cannot tell a lie: Our interest in being vegan was never entirely altruistic. According to a study in the journal Nutrition Reviews, people switching to vegetarian diets lose about a pound a week without changing any of their other habits; vegetarians, on average, weigh less than omnivores and experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. Neal Barnard, the president of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, even found evidence that vegan diets cause increased calorie burn after meals, meaning that plant-based foods might be used more efficiently as body fuel, rather than stored as fat.

But Nina Planck, a former vegan and the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why, isn't buying it. "Over time, you can't build a body out of plant food," she says. Her book, a manifesto touting the health benefits of not just fruits and vegetables, but other nonindustrial food including beef and full-fat dairy, is so convincing, it almost tempts us to abandon veganism. Saturated fats, she says, are essential to building immunity. You can get all the amino acids you need just from plant foods—but it's not easy. And those omega-3 fats so essential to brain function are mainly found in fish—walnuts and flaxseed aren't as good. Still, even this outspoken omnivore proselytizes about the limits of meat-eating. Planck notes that if you are not totally against killing animals (which you might guess from our shoe collections), there are other ways to eat in accordance with your conscience. She advocates eating organically, because pesticides pollute the body and environment, as well as seasonally and locally to cut down on fossil fuels used in transport and to support local agriculture.

Anna Lappé agrees. What's important, she thinks, is not adhering to a strict dietary regimen, but understanding that "our decisions affect each other." Even veganism, she points out, can have its drawbacks: Some vegans eat a lot of soy—and the soy industry is notoriously environmentally tone-deaf. And "just because you aren't eating animals doesn't mean they aren't dying so you can eat," Pollan says. "The combines that harvest corn have crushed woodchucks in their burrows." But being vegan, he continues, encourages a lot of good behavior: cooking more, reading labels, and being knowledgeable about what's in your food. Which is what we realize a few months later after we've both succumbed to the omnivore lifestyle. We're a lot more interested in where our food comes from and eat less meat and more veggies than before. And we still haven't gone back to eating hamburgers.